people portray vanilla as being super hard

[Deleted]

Pulling 3+ mobs during levelling was a suicide..nowadays you can kill them with autoattack....Please explain how is that more time consuming instead of harder?

Haven't you read the previous pages ? Nothing is hard anymore. CCing mobs, managing your resources, not running into 100 mobs at once, it's just mindless grinding.

[Deleted]

In my opinion, when people say "it was harder back then" what they mean is, everyone was at the same level of challenge/difficulty, and naturally some players are more skilled than others. I feel that Warcraft today have thrown the loot system out of proportion handing out epics and now even legendary on a silver platter. The only "challenge" left purely revolves around the word "mythic"

[skannerz22]

In my opinion, when people say "it was harder back then" what they mean is, everyone was at the same level of challenge/difficulty, and naturally some players are more skilled than others. I feel that Warcraft today have thrown the loot system out of proportion handing out epics and now even legendary on a silver platter. The only "challenge" left purely revolves around the word "mythic"

i suggested a large bulk of retail wow changes
yet blizzard on their own screwed the game up by thinking we all need epics
i suggested they add legendarys back into the game as rare drops to simulate vanilla epics
instead they added legendaries drop as much as vanilla blue gear *facepalm*

[Akka]

It's not super hard. It strikes a great balance of challenge, immersion, and accessibility. When WoW came out, it was seen as the "MMO for casuals" by the existing MMO scene. It is by no stretch of the imagination a grindy or difficult game in comparison to some other MMOs.

But that's why it's so good. It's fun and accessible while still being dangerous. The levels are long enough to make each level an accomplishment, and incentivize gearing yourself up at different gear levels, while still being short enough to not feel like hitting 60 is a hopeless endeavor.

It is an incredibly well-designed game in many aspects, and hit a very nice sweet spot of being accessible but not TOO accessible. Unfortunately I think that's where it all went wrong: the devs saw that the game being more accessible than its predecessors allowed it to succeed, so they continued the trend with every expansion, like a chef who saw that salting his food made it taste good, so he continues to pour tons of salt on his dish, rather than settling at the proper sweet-spot of saltiness.

Words of truth.

[Demithio]

Well, I guess everyone will find out when and if it gets released in its pure, unmodded, form.

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It's not super hard. It strikes a great balance of challenge, immersion, and accessibility. When WoW came out, it was seen as the "MMO for casuals" by the existing MMO scene. It is by no stretch of the imagination a grindy or difficult game in comparison to some other MMOs.

But that's why it's so good. It's fun and accessible while still being dangerous. The levels are long enough to make each level an accomplishment, and incentivize gearing yourself up at different character levels, while still being short enough to not feel like hitting 60 is a hopeless endeavor.

It is an incredibly well-designed game in many aspects, and hit a very nice sweet spot of being accessible but not TOO accessible. Unfortunately I think that's where it all went wrong: the devs saw that the game being more accessible than its predecessors allowed it to succeed, so they continued the trend with every expansion, like a chef who saw that salting his food made it taste good, so he continues to pour tons of salt on his dish, rather than settling at the proper sweet-spot of saltiness.

And this is why it exploded in popularity originally. Great design and high attention to detail, it got better with TBC and started sliding with wotlk.
That's a great and accurate analogy you used. Blizzard didn't know when to stop and ruined the entire dish.

[Kraenen]

It's challenging from a work-life balance perspective, I guess.

[Huntaer]

It wasn't super hard, just nowadays it's super easy. People will hit their face on a wall.

[epLe]

There are just so many factors that add up - making it "super hard" in the modern standards.

- Maintaining huge guilds 40m raid roster, with overhead of +10-20 players.
- Gearing 40man raid rosters with no bonus rolls, personal loot and only 3-4 items a boss.
- Having such amount of people actually put hours down in preparations (grinds / farming).

- No Public Tactics available
- Parsing their own combat log, try to interpret it, try convert it into something understandable to make a tactic out of.

- Power creep on gear was extremely low. difference in base dmg core hound tooth ilvl 70(mc) to Kingsfall ilvl 89(KT bis) was like 0.54dps.
- This gave room for the tightness of the tuning in Naxx, how every trash pull could wipe you as fast as a boss.

- This tuning part is where every single pirate server failed miserably btw, making their experience way different than how it was.
- Many guilds failed at just passing trash to reach bosses (both late AQ and early naxx), cant really say I've heard of that happening ever since.

- CC was also something you had to do during fights, not just at pulls, you had to monitor your cc target for periodical breaks, and reapply cc as needed.


IMO Anyone claiming it was so easy and simple, only tried it on pirate servers and only show off their lack of knowledge.

[last1214]

Pretty much what was said above. Warrior is definitely going to be more challenging than say a hunter or lock, but if you play like you do on retail while leveling, you're going to learn a hard fast lesson.

[MAGAmobile]

The focus of the game is different now than it was back in classic. Classic was focused more on leveling, later expansions shifted the focus to end game content instead. They streamlined leveling so people could get to end game faster now. Leveling took longer in classic because of pacing due to limited resources. Some classes could pull multiple mobs at once and kill them while leveling even in classic, others could not.

[xcoatsyx]

Most MMOs aren't "hard"

[Sky High]

It’s “hard” in the sense it tries real HARD to push my patience to its limits.

[taishar68]

This is just my opinion, but I think there is an element of peer pressure in these forums to describe WoW as very easy and we see the constant disclaimer of “well it wasn’t really hard” applied to older content, raids, pvp, etc.

It is certainly true that for some people, everything is easy, and for some, everything is hard, and so many degrees in between; but to suggest something is only one way or the other doesn’t hold water-your experience and mine don’t necessarily equate to a 1:1 ratio.

I think a better way to offer opinions on this issue is more personal, less empirical; how was it for you personally. A few folks in this thread have mentioned they knew this class or this class could face roll multiple mobs in vanilla; I have a different memory of the era, but maybe those folks played with better players than I was around.

Personally, I think vanilla was much harder, and much more time consuming in the sense of completion. Take for example, a not so fondly remembered quest in Arathi Highlands, where you had to collect 12 raptor hearts. This meant upwards of 40 kills, the drop rate was awful. This was great for skinners I imagine, but as a tailor, it was an endurance check. This one quest could easily take a half an hour or more, depending on luck, how often you had to eat and or bandage. There is no single quest in the game that can even rival this one in the game today, and very few quests since have such an awful drop rate...but even if there was, mobs die much faster and you have so much less downtime now. Mages can still conjure food. Whatever the hell for? Unless you’re Arcane you may as well have unlimited resources, and even if you are, your OOC regen is incredibly fast compared to vanilla.

When I leveled in vanilla I was a complete noob; I was a D2 player that took a flyer because the game was half price when I bought a new PC in 2006. I used fire because it did the most damage, and played defense like Rocky Balboa. I used tons and tons of bandages and my food and water to regen, and it was slow as hell. I don’t want Classic to be an on rails easy experience; it took me 3 months and seeing just about every zone in the game to go 1-60, and I am hopeful for the same experience again, but maybe a little faster this time.

Like I said earlier, my experience does not equal everyone else’s, so who can say how hard it was, or will be? It’s subjective. Until it’s no longer hard

[xcoatsyx]

It was inconvenient to do anything.

[Alienshroom]

Why is there an argument when we have an extensive and recent history of people playing and sticking with a vanilla version of the game on private servers? Its been proven people will play this on a freakin private server, they damn sure will play an official Blizzard one.

[Deleted]

A stupid affirmation doesn't become less stupid because three people are repeating it. Ten people could claim that it's not harder to be in danger of dieing than to not be, it would still be stupid.

True. But throwing personal insults on discussion like this makes you look stupid no matter. Honestly it's an open debate and no one can say the exact truth so it's naive to call someone stupid if they don't agree with you. No one will take you seriously if every post of yours have insults at the end of them, even if you had some good points

[The Sun]

Everything was so time consuming and not rewarding for more casual players. In fact, the game was punishing casual gamers. If you were determined enough to level up to 60, the thing that kept you motivated was your candid hope that one day you would have that full T1 set while in reality it would take soo long and so much effort and time that you wouldn't achieve it. In vanilla there was no balance : the game was just made for people with a LOT of free time in their hands so they can grind grind grind...


Legion is much much better content-wise since there is content for any kind of gamers.
oh and I'll not even talk about Classes gameplay. Legion is thousands miles ahead in that domain... and every other aspect actually.

(btw I think re-releasing the original version of the game is a great idea since it adds more value to the WoW licence overall. I don't want anything to be changed either. I'll probably play it as a tourist just to get the nostalgia back)

[Akka]

True. But throwing personal insults on discussion like this makes you look stupid no matter.

Perhaps. But when people quote a post which explicitely describes a logical fallacy, and they repeat said fallacy in their answer right under its description, then it shows they don't even bother reading and understanding something before shitting the thread, so whatever non-insulting explanation is going to fly high above their head. Doesn't give me a lot of motivation to waste time about it.

Honestly it's an open debate and no one can say the exact truth so it's naive to call someone stupid if they don't agree with you. No one will take you seriously if every post of yours have insults at the end of them, even if you had some good points

It's possible to have an open debate about opinion when the subject is rather murky and it's hard to know the truth one way or another.
When the numbers are here and the player behaviour is here, it becomes a lot less subjective and a lot more factual.
Claiming that higher stat have no influence on difficulty is mind-boggling (that's basically saying gear is useless, which we'll all agree is a pretty ridiculous argument). Claiming that having to take care not to die doesn't mean there is a difference in difficulty compared to not having to bother about it, is also nonsensical.

So no it's not really naïve. It's not about two opinions equally worthy, it's about one opinion supported by facts and basic concepts, and another which only seems supported by the ego of the posters.

[Caliph]

What was harder or at least had a modicum of difficulty was pulling. You couldn't just attack something but had to time it. and if it went south it became life or death. Dungeons were like that from 12-60 the whole way through. Raids were like that as well. It wasn't hard but it was difficult. And all those elite quests were hard and impossible without a group. Sometimes even with a group they became difficult.

More time consuming yes, more difficult yes, more annoying yes, more fun yes.

[chrisnumbers]

I'm most looking forward to seeing how the players down content just by having prior knowledge, and how big of a role gear plays compared to today. "Does raw skill and knowledge help more than gear did in 2004?" That's the question I can't wait to see the answer to.